Meta unveils an 'adult classification' tool to detect teenagers lying about their age on Instagram.

Meta has revealed more details about its strategy to use artificial intelligence in order to detect teenagers who lie about their age on Instagram. Beginning next year, the company will implement a tool called the "adult classifier," which aims to identify users under 18 years old and automatically apply more restrictive privacy settings to their accounts.

Allison Hartnett, director of product management for youth and social impact at Meta, explained that the software will analyze indicators such as the accounts users follow and the content they frequently interact with. If the tool suspects that a user is underage, it will switch their account to a teen account, regardless of the age indicated in their profile.

Meta did not immediately provide comments on the matter. The company had previously mentioned its intention to use artificial intelligence to identify young people who have falsified their age when it launched teen accounts in September. With these accounts, stricter privacy settings are automatically applied to users under 16 years old. For example, these accounts are automatically set to private and cannot send messages to strangers. Facing pressure from lawmakers and parents, Meta had already begun to implement certain restrictions on underage users before the official rollout of teen accounts; however, after this implementation, teenagers cannot change these settings without parental approval.

On Monday, the company did not disclose the effectiveness of the adult classifier in determining a person's age. Meta mentioned that those who are incorrectly identified by the tool will eventually have the opportunity to appeal, although they are still defining how this process will work. Additionally, the platform will ask teenagers who attempt to manually change their age to verify their identity. Users will have the option to upload a government-issued ID or submit a selfie video through Yoti. Previously, Meta collaborated with Yoti to implement an age verification system in Facebook Dating. Yoti's machine learning algorithm estimates a person's age based on facial features; once Yoti shares its estimate with Meta, both parties delete the video.

The adult classifier software is part of a broader effort by Meta to make it harder for people to lie about their age on Instagram. The company also plans to flag teenagers who attempt to create a new account using an email address already linked to an existing account with a different birth date. Additionally, it intends to use device identifiers to better understand who is creating a new profile.

Recently, Meta, along with Google and ByteDance, failed to convince a federal judge in the U.S. to dismiss a series of lawsuits alleging that these companies have not adequately protected their young users from the harmful and addictive effects of social media use.